Tapestry
by iheartvolume
Summary: My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue..." Years later, she tells her story. Character names will not be revealed until the end.


_Prologue_

Time had long ago lost its sense of decorum to her, which was a particularly unsurprising occurrence, considering that long ago all of her days had began to commence in an identical fashion to each other. She would wake up in the morning, dress, make her way down to the kitchen where she would dine on toast and coffee. An owl would deliver a copy of the Daily Prophet that would remain unread on the table until it was thrown into the garbage at the end of the day. Any outsider looking in on her life would have found the whole practice a bit ridiculous. Why pay each year for a subscription to a paper that would never be read? But she had her reasons.

After breakfast she would go sit in her study, a room that consisted of a stately desk, a fireplace, and a lounging sofa that faced a large picture window, looking out onto the rolling hills below and the vast skies above. Upon the desk sat the labors of this, the later part of her life. A manuscript, or a part of one at least, sat forlorn and abandoned, cowering next to a far taller stack of blank, empty pages waiting to be filled. Next to the stacks resided her quill, resting in a bottle filled to the brim with black ink.

Every day she entered her study and moved immediately to the desk, where she would dip her quill in ink to prepare it, then proceed to sit and stare at the blank pages in front of her. The words wouldn't come. The story was there; so much to be told, passed on to the world, to her children and now grandchildren. There was so much to tell them all. But the words would not come. For a life such as hers, words did not seem to exist. It had all been far too spectacular. Far too extraordinary. And every day she sat at her desk and attempted to capture the beautiful contradictions that had comprised her life in a literary form.

It wasn't that she felt inhibition or reluctance at sharing her story. She was an old woman with nothing to hide anymore. She just couldn't figure out how. So much had happened to her in her lifetime. Every day she would carry on in this fashion, wrestling internally with the written language, trying to convey her thoughts and feelings. Around noontime return to the kitchen for lunch, after which she would return to her desk and struggle with quill and paper for another hour or two, before rising in defeat and moving to rest on the sofa in front of the window. The rest of her afternoon and early evening would be spent gazing out the window, lost in thoughts and memories. She would have an equally quiet dinner alone in front of the fireplace, before retiring back to the sofa and her thoughts. All in all, a very quiet existence, and a nice change, she thought, for someone who had lived such a life as hers. She had no regrets, she had decided that long ago. But she would admit to herself as of late that she felt a severe disappointment at her inability to get her story onto paper. This was often the thought that plagued her in the quiet evenings after a day of no success with her manuscript. She knew she was quite aged, and as each day passed and she came closer to that greatest of eternal fates, she was quickly losing the chance to fulfill her last obligation. For she did not attempt to tell her story singularly of her own will, but also to make good on a promise she had made to someone long ago, a deathbed promise. And in both wizarding and muggle societies, deathbed promises were taken quite seriously, not that she would have taken it any less seriously if the person hadn't been in mortal peril. Partly because she never backed out on a promise, and partly because for this person in particular she would have gone to the ends of the earth and back. She would speak to this person every night after dinner, and apologize for having, as of yet, left her entrusted task uncompleted. She would sit alone with her thoughts until late into the evening, when she would take a cup of tea before retiring to her bed, only to wake up and repeat the process the following day.

In this way, her days and weeks ran together, until one day a visit brought her a chance for the salvation she so desperately needed.


End file.
